Railroad tunnels seem to be the dirtiest environments in the wilderness. How do the railroads manage the pollution? There’s soot and other chemicals that get into the runoff. The episode of Extreme Trains (whose whole season is finally out on DVD) that deal with tunnel drainage repairs really got me worried about the runoff coming out of those tunnels and how they affect the surrounding wilderness.
Over- reaction?
You have bigger issues coming out of sheetflow drainage out of farm fields than you do out of tunnels. Mineral content out of native seepage is a bigger problem than soot, silt fines and anything rail carried in the tunnel effluent.
Tunnel mileage in this country is incredibly small. I have yet to work in a “dry” tunnel.
Mostly, it’s just . . . [:-^] . . .
The soot and other chemicals aren’t any worse there than what is emitted elsewhere along the tracks, or by trucks and other diesels elsewhere - it’s just that it is concentrated in 2 or 4 discharge channels, so you point is well taken there. And imagine how much worse it would have been back in the day of steam locomotives !
But even worse is the ‘acid mine drainage’* or ‘AMD’ and similar effects, from the ground water leaching out = dissolving whatever minerals and chemicals are in the overburden mountain’s rocks - typically at least sulphur, which makes for sulphruic acid* - plus anything else of a particulate or solid nature from those rocks that might get suspended in the water along the way - think sand or asbestos particles, for example.
- Look at the rails and fastenings that come out of such ‘wet’ tunnels, and you’ll understand how corrosive those flows can be.
However, as a practical matter, most of that drainage/ discharge is usually either diluted or dissipated by soaking into the ballast before it gets too far, maybe even before it leaves the railroad’s ROW. As long as the discharge isn’t traceable or isn’t having a no
Environmental permitting is an arcane specialty. Class 1s employ an environmental permitting and compliance department with people that are expert in the field, as well as spend substantial sums on consultants. It’s a field I touch on almost daily but I am not expert in the slightest, so this is just general guidelines:
The legal: In most cases, existing railroad tunnels are categorically exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). New tunnels will generally require an environmental assessment (EA) or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) along with everything else on the rail line. Maintenance work to existing tunnels is almost always categorically exempt, too. NEPA pre-empts most state laws for railroad environmental except in California, because California enacted CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) prior to NEPA, therefore is grandfathered.
This doesn’t mean you just blithely do whatever you want; you will want to hire an environmental permitting expert and consider whether you need to file Findings of No Significant Effect memorandums with the governing agencies. For some recent tunnel work, we did this with the State DEQ, the tribes, the counties, the SHPO, and the Corps.
The practical: Think about where the emissions from the locomotives go if there is no tunnel: into the air, from where it falls into the environment, and if soluble, it all ends up in the water sooner or later. Air emissions are regulated for precisely this reason among others. An argument that the rail tunnel somehow concentrates the emissions and then dumps them into a specific environment is certainly possible to make, but would it succeed? Doubtful.
RWM.
As a former forester for the Northern Pacific and later Burlington Northern, I find your comments interestingly out of touch with natural occurances in undisturbed or nearly undisturbed environments. The normal definition of pollution has a human causitive that delivers undesirable or unhealthful effects on the humans or the environment. But what about “natural” events that cause pollution? Several things come to mind…(1) spring runoff that turns steams and rivers roily with mud, and (2) the yellowing and cloudy effects of tanic acid from western larch leaf drop. Both are natural occurances and are seen in all the wildlands of Montana and Idaho, where I worked.
We drew our water directly out of a stream not 5 miles from the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and although logging had taken place upstream from us many years ago, roily water due to mud was not much of an issue, but tanic acid from the larch was. We had the only house (or ranch – whatever – nothing but USFS land was upstream). There were no houses, settlements, grazing cattle, railroads, or anything else beside inactive logging roads above us. Basically, there was no human activity whatsoever upstream.
Western larch is a deciduous conifer…it drops it’s needles every fall and is leafless all winter. The needles are high in tanic acid, a water soluable yellowish-brown substance. The leaves (needles) fall in late October, and when
Don’t fish live in water, and…ummm…do stuff? Beavers are decidely aquatic. The odd duck can be found in water. Rotting logs, ground seepage, run-off at any time, but worst in the late fall.
Mining is absolutely necessary for our ways of life. No mines, no computers or power generation. They disturb the ground on a massive scale. How about foundries and steel mills? They would rank right up there. Nowadays, the places in Asia where young kids pick apart the innards of cell phones and computers…they gotta be getting pretty bad just about today.
I don’t know if people can fathom it, but a lot of hard science says mankind produces an exceedingly small portion of what could be termed free pollutants or problem substances annually that nature doesn’t produce in far greater quantities. It certainly applies to CO2.
-Crandell
My wife finds it interesting that in two canyons near here that are in the watershed for the Salt Lake Valley, dogs and other pets are prohibited–yet there is much wildlife in the canyons. If you go out of any of the buildings at Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, you see warnings that you are entering an area with wildlife, some of which can be dangerous to you. We think that there are far more deer, elk, badgers, potguts (a variety of ground squirrel) and other animals in these canyons than there would be dogs, cats, or what other pets that would be brought up by visitors.
Johnny
I took the question to pertain to ‘stuff’ running out of existing tunnels - not the construction of new ones. I haven’t yet found a specific USC or CFR provision that says quite how existing tunnels and maintenance of them are exempted, other than the general principle that since they are ‘existing’ and can continue to ‘exist’ without needing a ‘new’ federal permit or approval, they are effectively ‘grandfathered’.
But that right to continue to exist may be different from the environmental rules that apply to the operations of the facility. While I doubt that such operating rules could have the effect of shutting down a facility, I wouldn’t count on them as allowing free rein for unlimited discharges of toxics or haz-mats from the operation, either - that’s just practical and common sense in this day and age. For example, a fueling station can’t be allowed to have its spills and leaks get into a nearby trout stream, or into the underground groundwater aquifer - that was the fear of the Hauser litigants. Likewise, the tunnel discharge won’t be allowed to contaminate a stream and cause a fish kill that can be traced back to the railroad. Look at what happened - clean-up costs and fines - to SP after the acid spill on the Cantara Loop about 10 or 15 years ago
I recall reading some time ago that the thing that took the wind out of the sails of the great mercury scare was the discovery of a fossilized fish which contained levels of mercury comparable to what is found in fish today.
That doesn’t make it healthy, but, as you suggest, man isn’t always the villian some folks would make him out to be with regards to pollution.
And there is a reason that outfits that sell camping gear carry water purifying kits…
Somehow it’s become an axiom of environmental science that pretty much the first thing you do is separate and classify the substances according to their source and what they are. Thus, much of what has been mentioned above as occurring naturally is considered to be ‘background’ or ‘off-site’ or ‘pre-existing’ pollution, and hence is generally not the responsibility of a particular site owner/ operator.
This often comes up now in the context of TMDL = ‘‘Total Maximum Daily Loadings’’ of ‘stuff’ for discharges into streams. Specifically, for STP = Sewage Treatment Plant discharges, suppose the local environmental agency has said that to maintain acceptable water quality in a certain receiving stream, the TMDL for BOD = Biological Oxygen Demand - which is a measure of organic decompostion of a lot of the stuff that gets flushed down from toilets and garbage disposals, etc. - can’t exceed a concentration of 20 PPM = Parts Per Million. If the stream is presently at a BOD concentration of 15, then the STP can’t release more BOD than would cause the total weighted concentration to go over 20 - depending on how much dilution occurs, the STP’s actual discharge could ha
Link to Altoona City Authority’s ‘‘Case Study’’ on Glennwhite Watershed (Horseshoe Curve). Note that near the bottom of the narrative, mention is made of a using for this project a penalty that was assessed against ConRail, but no details are provided as to when, where, for what, etc.
http://altoonawater.com/water/watersheds/ws_case.html
- PDN.
Technical ionfo on AMD from the Wildlands Conservancy’s 2008 Annual Report, page 5, at: http://www.wildlandspa.org/news/2008_annual_report.pdf
Abandoned Mine Drainage Restoration Projects Improve Water Quality in the Lehigh River
ABANDONED MINE DRAINAGE (AMD) is the most widespread and expensive water pollution challenge in Pennsylvania. In 2000, Wildlands Conservancy developed a comprehensive action plan to remediate the eight AMD discharges entering the Lehigh River. These projects take years to complete and require significant funding. Wildlands Conservancy completed the Lausanne Tunnel AMD project in 2004 and we are in the process of completing our second effort, Buck Mountain. Wildlands Conservancy secured more than $900,000 from Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to complete both of these projects. DEP counts on local conservation organizations like Wildlands Conservancy to apply for grants and manage these projects on behalf of their communities.
Without remediation, the abandoned coal mines will continue to discharge metals, acids, and other pollution into the Lehigh River and its tributaries, negatively impacting our drinking water, habitat for wildlife and fish, and
The Barnes & Tucker Coal Co. AMD remediation order case was from 1974, not the 1950s as I said above. Here’s a link to short article on it:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=j9wNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_mwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4192%2C3830542
And a link to a book article on it:
Thanks for all that effort, Paul. The results are both encouraging and reassuring.
I have a closer-than-I’d-like connection to a gold mining project out west in your country that went bad. I was not involved in any way, but my father was a consultant for the operation when it was being stood up. Due to penalties and rigid contractual requirements imposed by lenders, the various construction elements were sometimes pressed during dangerous conditions. One result was an unkown tear in a heap-leaching pond where cyanide was sprayed over gold-bearing material. This was at 7-8K feet, where a lot of melt and ground water ran with gravity. I am sure you can figure out the rest.
-Crandell
You’re welcome, Crandell. Wasn’t too hard - mainly thinking about where I’d seen certain things, and then tying them together in a way that would make sense to a layperson. I’ve seen the Lausanne Tunnel discharge point in person on one of may canoeing trips a few years ago - which was owned by the coal mining subsidiary of one of the anthracite railroads, I believe - as well as the Glennwhite Run at Horseshoe Curve in this past August. Plus, I worked in that field for a few years, and still dabble in it. Along the way I managed to corrupt my daughter, who now has a Master’s Degree in Geology specializing in hydro-geology and geochemistry, is a P.G. = licensed as a Professional Geologist, and has and still does work for a couple of large multi-national environmental consulting firms, mainly on the clean-ups of various ‘SuperFund’ sites around the US.
Thinking about this a little further led to the following: Shorter tunnels - like only a couple hundred feet long - usually don’t discharge too much water, simply because there’s not that much surface area or depth of overburden above them to capture and hold the water, and their length is so short that the exposed interior surface area is not too much. However, logic and experience follows that the longer tunnels will usually produce much larger volumes of groundwater discharge, as well as the soot problem mentioned by the Original Poster. Well, your country has a couple of the longest railroad tunnels in the world - CPR’s Connaught and Mount McDonald Tunnels - which might be subject to this kind of thing. In particular, Mount McDonald having been built in the modern age of environmental concerns - and right in the middle of a major Candaian National Park - got me to wondering if and how the
This is responding to Paul North’s post mentioning CPR’s long tunnels.
There were several major environmental aspects of CPR’s 1980s Rogers Pass Project, which involved the 9 mile Mount Macdonald Tunnel, the 1 mile Shaughnessy Tunnel and about 11 miles of surface route. The revegetation of cut and fill slopes was very important, to encourage the scar on the hillside through Glacier National Park to fade as quickly as possible. Seeds from the local vegetation, especially trees, were grown in a nursery. Using non-local species was not acceptable to Parks Canada. And of course the railway wanted vegetation to grow too, for erosion control.
There were also tight limits regarding the fouling of surface water during construction, by silts, etc… This was primarily an issue where watercourses were crossed and as far as I know were easily met by careful scheduling and controlling/directing stream flow and runoff from the raw grade. Mother Nature did not have to abide by them, of course, and one period of heavy rain increased the turbidity by an order of magnitude beyond those allowed the railway! (And all natural.)
I think the nature of the water flowing out of the completed tunnels was considered, and discounted as expected to be of minimal concern. 20 years later I can’t remember specific details. The volume of water is not great in any case. The MacDonald tunnel was completely concrete lined from the start, and both the Shaughnessy Tunnel and the 1916 Connaught Tunnel are now all, or mostly, lined.
A multi-volume set of reports and drawings was provided to the engineering libraries of a number of Canadian universities and other institutions following completion of the project. A number of environmental reports are included. Possibly one or two sets may have been donated to premier universities in the USA. (Conspicuously absent from the set is any reference to how closely the east and west headings met in the M
Again, I believe 15- and 20-year-old diesels can be built into two-unit diesel electric-electric combiniations, where a diesel is paired with an electric that is rebuilt from an old diesel. The diesel is a slug for added tractive effort for the electric under catenary and the electric a slug for the diesel outside of electrified areas. Both also usable for shorter trains in their own respective areas.
Hi Paul,
Your knowledge and your willingness to answer questions is greatly appreciated.
To change the subject, please tell me how to get the 40 page report on the horrible accident at Anoka, MN.
Thanks
Richard Vohs
My prior answer was a bit garbled – I blame the airport – so let me try to correct it.
Federal environmental law comes in two flavors: consultative and permitting. Consultative laws, such as NEPA, require the federal government before taking an action to consult with other agencies that administer federal resources and federal law, e.g., NFWS, USFS, BLM, USACE, etc., so that everyone becomes aware of the consequences of the action and so that the action is “eyes wide open.” NEPA does not result in a permit.
Permitting laws, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, are laws that require a permit to be obtained before anyone, beyond significance thresholds, can discharge pollutants into the air or water, or take endangered species, or take or affect other federal assets.
Federal environmental permit law does not necessarily pre-empt state environmental permit law. Pre-emption typically occurs when a state law enters into an area that is specifically reserved to the federal government. The classic pre-emption we deal with is economic regulation of interstate commerce. A state that attempted to use an environmental regulation to do an end-around on the ICC Termination Act would be subject to legal action by the federal government.
Railways are a special case because they are a linear object, not a point object like a factory, with the exception of locomotive shops, yards, etc. State and federal permit law usually does not address linear facilities. State and federal permit law could address linear facilities, but only if it is done in a non-discriminatory fashion. For example, if a state decided it wished to require a railway right-of-way to treat water that drains from the right-of-way before it enters a stream, it would also have to require its own highways to treat water that drains from its rights-of-way.
Generally railway linear facilities do not reach the quantity of effluent minimums or area of draina
Thanks for the opinions and data!! It’s very interesting how widely the opinions range from “important” to “who cares, get a life?” We are an interesting bunch, here.